Modern discussions of rural labor in Byzantine Egypt (300–700 CE) have been bedevilled by disagreement over the definition of that concept. There are three main competing conceptualizations: (i) Rural labor has been defined in terms of serfdom as a parallel outcome to the emergence of “private” (or feudal) large landowners as opposed to the decline of “public powers”; (ii) Rural labor has been described as “free” since it was based on contractual arrangements (primarily, rent tenancy) and on the payment of a public levy to the state; and (iii) Rural labor has been characterized in terms of exploitation, that is, as the instrument through which landholders (both landowners and tenants) extracted unpaid wealth from the population of producers. Building on a vast literature, this essay seeks to clarify that while the notion of feudal serfdom does not find corroborations in the Byzantine sources, the contractual, tributary, and “exploitative” characterizations of labor were not mutually exclusive, but instead describe different aspects and possible developments of the employer-employee relationships.

拜占庭埃及（公元300-700年）对农村劳动力的现代讨论）因对该概念的定义存在分歧而被困扰。共有三种主要的竞争概念：（i）农奴被定义为农奴制，是与“私人”（或封建）大地主的出现平行的结果，而不是“公共权力”的衰落；（ii）农村劳动力被描述为“免费”，因为它是基于合同安排（主要是房租租赁）和向国家缴纳公共税款的；（iii）农村劳动具有剥削的特征，即作为土地所有者（土地所有者和租户）通过其从生产者人口中提取无偿财富的工具。本文以大量文献为基础，试图阐明，尽管封建农奴制的概念在拜占庭的资料中并未得到佐证，但契约，